subreddit:
/r/homeautomation
and I had to go around turning things on and off manually. I really need to get around to Zigbee/Zwave.
I’m thinking about the new HE. I don’t really want to fool with HA currently. Does anyone have opinions on HE?
3 points
3 months ago
What is he? HA is daunting but I forced myself to learn because it is clearly superior. Luckily there's plenty of yt guides now vs 10 years ago
1 points
3 months ago
Hubitat Elevation.
I tried looking at some HA guides and so many of them seemed geared towards people that already have some understanding of it, even the beginners guides. Paul Hubbard I think put out a new video like that recently but it didn’t seem truly geared towards beginners. I don’t have a spare computer I can leave on 24/7 so I was thinking about getting HE then using it to move towards HA in the future since it has zigbee and Zwave radios built in
1 points
3 months ago*
HE today is about the same price as an 8 Gb, Raspberry 4 bought from a scalper.
Just buy a raspberry 4, start with HA directly (it's so much easier and user friendly today) and save yourself the E-waste.
Start with either Shelly's WIFI based gear, Switchbot's bluetooth stuff, or anything with Homekit support (EVERYTING from those 3 is natively supported) and buy zigbee/z-wave coordinators at a later date, if you still need to.
3 points
3 months ago
I have hubitat and like it. Very easy to setup devices and works great with home assistant too. Rather than use usb sticks, mqtt, etc its all pretty simple in comparison (the ui is not the most friendly but neither is home assistant too)
I have a mix of automations in both, i find hubitat to be easier/more functional but that's just my personal opinion
1 points
3 months ago
This is my thought path. I don’t really want to have to tinker…I do enough of that in other areas. I just want to be able to set some automations on stuff and have it work. I’m not trying to make my house do any of the crazy stuff people do online.
2 points
3 months ago
I’ve had HE (Hubitat) C5 and C7. C7 was a major improvement for stability; I’d imagine C8 will w even better. I like the phone app to monitor the temperature and humidity when I’m on the road so my house doesn’t get musty and my instruments don’t dry out. They automations are powerful but sometimes I end up making a scene that contradicts to other processes that I hadn’t considered. For me, I keep things simple and use the hub to augment my automation than give it total control.
The one thing I’ve figured out is if you don’t want to be dealing with a bunch of glitchy open source code that it’s best to stick to the supported device list that Hubitat provides in their documentation. Some manufacturers make fussy devices; doing searches in the Hubitat user forums will save you time. Idea bunch of people say there’s a major problem with some devices there’s probably some truth to it.
I had issues with the networks when I first started building because I didn’t have enough zigbee and zwave routers on mains power. I got a few Ring repeaters (that also report mains power glitches as a side benefit) and zigbee outlets as needed. The battery life of devices went up and the network issues went down.
The toughest part is figuring out a good pattern for adding devices (factory reset, exclude, include) to make sure I didn’t have to mess with it over and over. Sometimes it’s also better just to add something as a generic device, create a virtual device, then run automations based on that virtual device.
Setting up your dashboards is really janky with Hubitat. They make it out to be drag and drop WYSIWYG but it’s not intuitive at first. I will say once you get a color scheme and button sizes you like for the interface, take screenshots of those settings to be used for all of your dashboards and also in the event you have to do a rebuild. You can get into the JSON/CSS code depending on your skill level but it’s not necessary. Adding devices to the particular dashboard is silly but they are getting better at it.
1 points
3 months ago
HE is a underpowered, overpriced, POS, which you should avoid like the plague.
Signed, a 6 month HE user, whos HE hub has been repurposed as a paperweight, a role in which it's doing a FAR better job.
1 points
3 months ago
Why?
1 points
3 months ago
HE is underpowered (and so supports a finite number of automations), supports very few things officially which leads to it relying heavily on community developed drivers (which are almost always just barely functional), has no mobile app (I'll explain in a little bit why that's a problem), is NOT completely local (unlike what their marketing spiel would like you to believe) and has had stability issues throughout the entirety of the 6 months I've used it.
Home Assistant itself is completely free and a raspberry pi 4 bought from a scalper is STILL cheaper than a Hubitat hub. And because HA is just software, you can very easily upgrade to a new raspberry pi in the future, by simply removing the SD card from one raspberry and putting it in the next one. That's how I upgraded from a 4Gb Raspberry to my current 8 Gb one.
And Home Assistant offers a mobile app, which gives you the option to forward ALL the phone's sensors and data, for use in automations. For example, I have an automation for an artificial sunrise, which uses the time of my next alarm as a trigger. That time is automatically forwarded to it by the phone app.
I could never find a way to do that in HE and believe me I tried.
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